Archive for February, 2007

We were happy to get our new camera from UPS today, a Canon SD800-IS. So far I’m really pleased with this. It has image stabilization (which lets you take mostly vibration-free pictures) and a 28mm wide-angle lens on it which means that you can take a picture of an entire room with it. It’s nice to have a real camera again instead of always using the one on my cameraphone (Treo 700p). I’m looking forward to doing more interesting and high-quality photography with this 7.1 megapixel tiny wizard of a camera.

We were also glad today when Eric brought the sample of granite and glass back from the water jet cutters. It looks awesome. And also looks like it will be an extremely difficult job to do right, but one that will be really really striking once it is all finished and installed.

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I finally ventured down to explore the new Metrolink train station undeground at the intersection of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway (right near Kayaks and Washington University.) This is some video I took using my Treo 700p.

Train arriving:

Train departing:

You’ll notice in the second video the neat light changing artwork along the walls, as well as a soothing soundscape. Quite nice, I thought.

So, I finally got my packages of 300 LEDs (ordered on Ebay from a Chinese manufacturer) and 100 watch batteries for the purpose of experimenting with the concept of the LED throwies today.

I made my first one with scotch tape and an orage 10mm LED. It was so exciting when it lit up. Silly, I know, to get excited about such a small thing. By the way, I had ordered the parts for my LED throwie kit earlier this week, before the city of Boston came to a screeching halt due to freaking out about a street art promotion for a cartoon show made of LED lights that caused a bomb scare. Because, well, gosh darnit, those lights must be… a BOMB! In my opinion what happened in Boston was the same result as crying FIRE in a crowded theatre. Except the theatre is the United States of America, and the person crying FIRE is the Bush/Cheney White House. Somebody is winning when our response to new promotional art is to call in the bomb squad. Somehow, though, I don’t think it is Osama bin Laden who has instilled this fear in the American people. Who wins when everyone in the country is afraid? Who gains more power?

Anyways, I was very excited to open the packages and construct my first LED throwie. The magnets haven’t arrived yet, so it’s not quite a true throwie but it is still fun to play with. Then it was time for my nightly dog walk with Kuma, going to Tower Grove Park. Tonight it is about 14Â° F out (pretty cold) and the park still has a light covering of snow and ice from yesterday. As I was walking along, holding my ever so precious glowing orange LED and playing with it, it occured to me that it might be neat if I attached it to Kuma’s leash so that it would track her movements as she ran around sniffing different squirrel tracks.

This is a short movie I made of her dancing movements with her own personal LED throwie light tracer dog leash modification.

It’s kind of neat to see Kuma’s movements captured by light. I took the video using my Treo 700p cameraphone. You can hear the crunch of my footsteps on the snowy pavement.

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A small window will appear telling you the Pagerank.

I just finished making some adjustments to Searchball. This is a small little service that gives you a bookmarklet that lets you check the Google Pagerank for any site simply by clicking it. This is really nice if you are using Safari or any other browser that doesn’t have a Google Toolbar or browser extension (like Firefox) that supports showing you the Pagerank of the site you’re viewing.